Caving Elective at V-Week Chester County Council, BSA 2011

One of the best volunteer jobs I have is introducing kids to caving. One of the ways I get to do this is by helping out at V-Week, summer camp for the Chester County Council, BSA Venturing program. The Venturing Cave Exploring Elective requirements are a good outline for accomplishing this. Plus when they’ve completed the Elective they are one more step closer to earning the Ranger Award.

Like other activities that BSA is involved with the elective encompasses the “Learn, Do, Teach” method. I’ve covered this elective in more detail in other posts on this blog which I encourage you to look at. I’m not going to go into those details this time, but I wanted to talk a little about the elective itself.

Most of the kids, maybe all of them, thought this would be a hard class and difficult to earn this. But when you break it down, and you have good resources, it can be covered in a few days. There are some prerequisites that I encourage students to do ahead of time. But most of it can be done in two half-day sessions with some homework and a trip to a wild cave.

Now, yes, you can earn the elective without the caving trip, but that would be like taking a bicycle class and never get on a bike or a canoeing class without ever stepping into a canoe. Just not that much fun. Most of the class work can be done in the cave. And that is a much more suitable, and more fun, classroom for this type of course.

Also, I don’t like lectures. I so much prefer hands on type activities where everyone is engaged in what’s going on.

I hope all you who were there enjoyed it as much as I did. If you missed it, here's some videos to enjoy.

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Thanks,

Allen